United Arab Emirates

Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasising the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it posits constructions as the central building blocks of language, i.e., linguistic units of different granularity that combine syntax and semantics. As a first step towards assessing the compatibility of CxG with the syntactic and semantic knowledge demonstrated by state-of-the-art pretrained language models (PLMs), we present an investigation of their capability to classify and understand one of the most commonly studied constructions, the English comparative correlative (CC). We conduct experiments examining the classification accuracy of a syntactic probe on the one hand and the models&#39; behaviour in a semantic application task on the other, with BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa as the example PLMs. Our results show that all three investigated PLMs are able to recognise the structure of the CC but fail to use its meaning. While human-like performance of PLMs on many NLP tasks has been alleged, this indicates that PLMs still suffer from substantial shortcomings in central domains of linguistic knowledge.

EMNLP 2022

The better your Syntax, the better your Semantics? Probing Pretrained Language Models for the English Comparative Correlative

construction grammar

probing

semantics

syntax

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasising the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it posits constructions as the central building blocks of language, i.e., linguistic units of different granularity that combine syntax and semantics. As a first step towards assessing the compatibility of CxG with the syntactic and semantic knowledge demonstrated by state-of-the-art pretrained language models (PLMs), we present an investigation of their capability to classify and understand one of the most commonly studied constructions, the English comparative correlative (CC). We conduct experiments examining the classification accuracy of a syntactic probe on the one hand and the models' behaviour in a semantic application task on the other, with BERT, RoBERTa, and DeBERTa as the example PLMs. Our results show that all three investigated PLMs are able to recognise the structure of the CC but fail to use its meaning. While human-like performance of PLMs on many NLP tasks has been alleged, this indicates that PLMs still suffer from substantial shortcomings in central domains of linguistic knowledge.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

* EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid” in a second sense, as well: we allowed both direct and rolling review paper submissions, building on the pilot experiment of EMNLP 2021, which considered a small number of ARR submissions. 
* Familiar from NAACL but new to EMNLP, we’ve added an industry track.
* During the conference, “portals” will link virtual poster sessions to in-person conference participants during poster sessions each day.
* The first ACL-family conference in the United Arab Emirates.

 *Message from Noah A. Smith, University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, Washington, USA* 
***EMNLP 2022 General Chair***
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/9eec7d4a287ee18c278b08229290aa83.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlPv6QBeo62VVTughj2jkiLeyHd1WnUt/view)
 
[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/a3db7a768409f05192210d98601edb25.png)](https://emnlp2022.rocket.chat/)

To access this site you need to register. Please register [here](https://2022.emnlp.org/registration/).

Register here

Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87513875103?pwd=toIiAZbysXrdxP4dTA4MduvusabVTT.1

V57-B: Federated Meta-Learning for Emotion and Sentiment Aware Multi-modal Complaint Identification

Group bias in natural language processing tasks manifests as disparities in system error rates across texts authorized by different demographic groups, typically disadvantaging minority groups. Dataset balancing has been shown to be effective at mitigating bias, however existing approaches do not directly account for correlations between author demographics and linguistic variables, limiting their effectiveness. To achieve Equal Opportunity fairness, such as equal job opportunity without regard to demographics, this paper introduces a simple, but highly effective, objective for countering bias using balanced training.
We extend the method in the form of a gated model, which incorporates protected attributes as input, and show that it is effective at reducing bias in predictions through demographic input perturbation, outperforming all other bias mitigation techniques when combined with balanced training.

Balancing out Bias: Achieving Fairness Through Balanced Training

Pre-trained masked language models successfully perform few-shot learning by formulating downstream tasks as text infilling. How- ever, as a strong alternative in full-shot settings, discriminative pre-trained models like ELECTRA do not fit into the paradigm. In this work, we adapt prompt-based few-shot learning to ELECTRA and show that it outperforms masked language models in a wide range of tasks. ELECTRA is pre-trained to distinguish if a token is generated or original. We naturally extend that to prompt-based few-shot learning by training to score the originality of the target options without introducing new parameters. Our method can be easily adapted to tasks involving multi-token predictions without extra computation overhead. Analysis shows that ELECTRA learns distributions that align better with downstream tasks.

Prompting ELECTRA: Few-Shot Learning with Discriminative Pre-Trained Models

CDialog: A Multi-turn Covid-19 Conversation Dataset for Entity-Aware Dialog Generation

Learning sentence embeddings in an unsupervised manner is fundamental in natural language processing. Recent common practice is to couple pre-trained language models with unsupervised contrastive learning, whose success relies on augmenting a sentence with a semantically-close positive instance to construct contrastive pairs. Nonetheless, existing approaches usually depend on a mono-augmenting strategy, which causes learning shortcuts towards the augmenting biases and thus corrupts the quality of sentence embeddings. A straightforward solution is resorting to more diverse positives from a multi-augmenting strategy, while an open question remains about how to unsupervisedly learn from the diverse positives but with uneven augmenting qualities in the text field. As one answer, we propose a novel Peer-Contrastive Learning (PCL) with diverse augmentations. PCL constructs diverse contrastive positives and negatives at the group level for unsupervised sentence embeddings. PCL performs peer-positive contrast as well as peer-network cooperation, which offers an inherent anti-bias ability and an effective way to learn from diverse augmentations. Experiments on STS benchmarks verify the effectiveness of PCL against its competitors in unsupervised sentence embeddings.

PCL: Peer-Contrastive Learning with Diverse Augmentations for Unsupervised Sentence Embeddings

A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the challenges and opportunities in the application of causal inference to the textual domain, with its unique properties. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects with text, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the NLP community.

Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond

Although contextualized word embeddings have led to great improvements in automatic language understanding, their potential for practical applications in document exploration and visualization has been little explored. Common visualization techniques used for, e.g., model analysis usually provide simple scatter plots of token-level embeddings that do not provide insight into their contextual use. In this work, we propose KeywordScape, a visual exploration tool that allows users to overview, summarize, and explore the semantic content of documents based on their keywords. While existing keyword-based exploration tools assume that keywords have static meanings, our tool represents keywords in terms of their contextualized embeddings. Our application visualizes these embeddings in a semantic landscape that represents keywords as islands on a spherical map. This keeps keywords with similar context close to each other, allowing for a more precise search and comparison of documents.

KeywordScape: Visual Document Exploration using Contextualized Keyword Embeddings

This demo paper presents a Google Docs add-on for automatic Arabic word-level readability visualization. The add-on includes a lemmatization component that is connected to a five-level readability lexicon and Arabic WordNet-based substitution suggestions. The add-on can be used for assessing the reading difficulty of a text and identifying difficult words as part of the task of manual text simplification. We make our add-on and its code publicly available.

Arabic Word-level Readability Visualization for Assisted Text Simplification

Logical reasoning on natural language is one of the most challenging tasks for deep learning models. There has been an increasing interest in developing new benchmarks to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of language models such as BERT. In parallel, new models based on transformers have emerged to achieve ever better performance on these datasets. However, there is currently no library for logical reasoning that includes such benchmarks and models. This paper introduces LogiTorch, a PyTorch-based library that includes different logical reasoning benchmarks, different models, as well as utility functions such as co-reference resolution. This makes it easy to directly use the preprocessed datasets, to run the models, or to finetune them with different hyperparameters. LogiTorch is open source and can be found on GitHub.

LogiTorch: A PyTorch-based library for logical reasoning on natural language

Biomedical information retrieval has often been studied as a task of detecting whether a system correctly detects entity spans and links these entities to concepts from a given terminology. Most academic research has focused on evaluation of named entity recognition (NER) and entity linking (EL) models which are key components to recognizing diseases and genes in PubMed abstracts. In this work, we perform a fine-grained evaluation intended to understand the efficiency of state-of-the-art BERT-based information extraction (IE) architecture as a biomedical search engine. We present a novel manually annotated dataset of abstracts for disease and gene search. The dataset contains 23K query-abstract pairs, where 152 queries are selected from logs of our target discovery platform and PubMed abstracts annotated with relevance judgments. Specifically, the query list also includes a subset of concepts with at least one ambiguous concept name. As a baseline, we use off-she-shelf Elasticsearch with BM25. Our experiments on NER, EL, and retrieval in a zero-shot setup show the neural IE architecture shows superior performance for both disease and gene concept queries.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2022

V57-B: Federated Meta-Learning for Emotion and Sentiment Aware Multi-modal Complaint Identification

Similar lecture

The Better Your Syntax, the Better Your Semantics? Probing Pretrained Language Models for the English Comparative Correlative